Vericolor production offering touristic view Olvera Street and the old Mexican quarter in Los Angeles, California.


This movie is part of the collection: Prelinger Archives

Producer: Pizor (William M. )
Sponsor: N/A
Audio/Visual: Sd, C
Keywords: California: Los Angeles; Mexican Americans; Tourism

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: Pithecanthropus - - January 10, 2012
Subject: It's still there all right.
Olvera Street is certainly still there, although it always was and is a tourist trap. La Golondrina, BTW is well worth the trouble of going there, but by local standards, its history of continuous operation back to 1930 makes it more historic than Olvera Street itself. Olvera's historicity is almost entirely fabricated, and most of the structures have little to do with Mexicans or with the founding of L.A. Until it was made over under the direction of socialite Christine Sterling in 1930, it was just a grimy alley. In 1920, Chaplin shot several scenes of "The Kid" there, it being well suited to the aura of urban poverty he wished to project.

Sonoratown was an adjacent Latino neighborhood which still had a number of historic adobe houses as the narrator described. This fact may have lent a facet of greater authenticity at the time. Now however, Sonoratown is long gone, the victim of L.A.'s peculiar brand of urban renewal, which usually involves replacing low-income housing with, not much at all--that is empty plazas and pointless parks where nobody goes anyway.

ETA: La Golondrina has long since graduated from iced tea to margaritas. And they are margaritas full of strength and character that will make you sit up and take notice, as they are the best you will ever have this side of beach shack cantina on some secluded Mexican beach.

Reviewer: stinky wizzleteats - - September 6, 2005
Subject: THEY'RE NOT NAZIS!!!!!
I enjoyed this film, except the narration, but I really have to say something about the other reviewers comments that really bugs me. The swastika is an ancient symbol of good luck, it was around thousands of years before the nazis started using it. Now it's pretty much erased from history espescially in the US and europe. Native Americans, Romans, Greeks and many other cultures used it. It's a popular symbol in Buddism, if you go to asia it's everywhere on ancient temples and stuff and in the US it was a good luck symbol up untill WW2. It was put on keychains, coins and things like a four leaf clover is today. It's a combonation of four 'L's, Luck, Light, Love and Life. I have many old magazines from the 20s and 30s and you'd be surprised how much it shows up in ads and everywhere. In one 20's sewing magazine it shows how to knit a sweater with a big swastika on the front. There was even a pulp magazine publisher that used a swastika as it's logo. And I think even the US army used it on a patch worn by soldiers up untill that time too.
So swastika doesn't mean Nazi, especially preWW2.

Reviewer: Spuzz - - June 27, 2005
Subject: Nazi Mexicans??
An interesting tour around Olvera street in Los Angeles... Not too sure if it's still there or not. If it is, let's hope they don't have the stereotypes they have display in this film. The narrator is awfully strange making jokes somewhat at the expense of the Mexicans. Mind you, there is some lovely photography of the tourists down this street, and the music, while sometimes repetitious, is nice. This is sort of like a Mexican tourist trap, except you're outside of Mexico it looks like.

As the reviewer below me has said, not too sure why one of the houses has a nazi symbol on it.

Reviewer: gcopter - - April 30, 2005
Subject: Mexican Nazis?
I wish someone could tell me how does a Nazi Swastika ended up painted on the side of the house?

Shotlist

A production in Trucolor about Olvera Street and the old Mexican quarter in Los Angeles, California




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